This one-day Workshop examined the practices and theories of people’s engagement with the land: the forms and consequences of land distribution in conquered territories; the different meanings of possession, tenancy, and usufruct; the conflicts among and transformations in European concepts and practices of land management in the Americas; the passion of individual Europeans for free ownership of land in the Americas; and the role of available land overseas in Britain's "Great Divergence."

9:30-10:00 a.m.Bernard Bailyn, Harvard University
Introduction

10:00-10:45 a.m.Allan Greer, University of Toronto"Feudal North America"

10:45-11:00 a.m. Break

11:00-11:45 a.m.Stuart Banner, University of California, Los Angeles
"Manhattan for $24: Interpreting Indian Land Transactions of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries"

11:45 a.m.-12:30 p.m.Rebecca Horn, University of Utah
"A Patchwork in the Countryside: Nahua and Spanish Land Tenure Practices in Central New Spain"

12:45-2:00 p.m. Lunch

2:00-2:45 p.m.Claire Priest, Northwestern University
"Understanding the End of Entail: Information, Institutions, and Slavery in the American Revolutionary Period"

2:45-3:30 p.m.Lauri Tähtinen, University of Cambridge"Views of Land among the Jesuits and Amerindians in Sixteenth-Century Brazil"

3:30-3:45 p.m. Break

3:45-4:30 p.m.Faren Siminoff, Nassau Community College
"Creating Atlantic America: Transforming Land to Property in the Seventeenth-Century Southern New England Basin"